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Screenshot of Paperless-ngx website

// screenshot of docs.paperless-ngx.com ↗

PRODUCTIVITY & BUSINESS · PRO TIER

Paperless-ngxpro

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that scans, OCRs, tags, and archives your paper documents into a searchable digital library. Consumes from email, scanner upload, watched folder; OCRs everything via Tesseract; auto-tags via machine learning. Replaces a filing cabinet with a fast searchable archive.

Install via WHMCS → Visit docs.paperless-ngx.com ↗
📝 Productivity & Business Min 2048 MB RAM Port 8000 (http) Tier pro
// What it is

A closer look.

Paperless-ngx is a document management system that scans, OCRs, tags, and archives your paper documents into a searchable digital library. Consumes from email, scanner upload, watched folder; OCRs everything via Tesseract; auto-tags via machine learning. Replaces a filing cabinet with a fast searchable archive.

For households and small businesses drowning in paper — receipts, contracts, bills, tax docs — Paperless-ngx is the canonical answer.

// Use cases

What it's for.

Concrete scenarios where teams pick Paperless-ngx over the SaaS alternative.

◆

Household paper archival

receipts, invoices, tax documents, contracts

◈

Small business records

supplier invoices, contracts, employee documents

◇

Legal compliance

retain financial records for required statutory periods

▣

Tax preparation

searchable archive of all year-relevant documents

▦

Office digitization

scan-and-shred workflow for going paperless

// Who it's for

Built for these teams.

If your team profile matches one of these, Paperless-ngx is a strong fit out of the box.

Profile A

Households & families

managing personal paperwork (taxes, bills, contracts)

Profile B

Small business owners

replacing physical filing with searchable digital archive

Profile C

Accountants

organizing client documents per tax year

Profile D

Legal professionals

managing case documents with full-text search

Profile E

Privacy-conscious users

rejecting cloud document services for sensitive paperwork

// Differentiators

Why teams pick Paperless-ngx.

When evaluating self-hosted options for this category, here are the dimensions on which Paperless-ngx consistently lands above the alternatives.

  • ✓GPL-3.0 — fully open, no commercial restrictions for self-host
  • ✓OCR built-in — Tesseract integration on every document automatically
  • ✓Auto-tagging — ML-based classification trained on your tagging patterns
  • ✓Email ingestion — forward bills/receipts to a dedicated address, auto-import
  • ✓Mobile-friendly — responsive UI, mobile scanner app integrations
  • ✓Active development — community-maintained fork after original abandonment
// Integrations

Connects to.

The stack you'll plug Paperless-ngx into — services, protocols, and adjacent apps in the BluixApps catalog.

◇
Document sources
watched folder, email IMAP, REST API upload, mobile apps
◈
OCR engines
Tesseract (100+ languages), djvulibre for DJVU
◆
Scanners
any device that can scan-to-folder or scan-to-email
▣
Mobile apps
Paperless Mobile (Android), iOS via web
▦
Identity
local users + LDAP via reverse proxy auth
▩
Storage
local filesystem or S3-compatible for documents
▼
Webhooks
fire on document classification events
// Adoption & deployment

Notable users & community

  • 23k+ GitHub stars
  • Featured constantly on r/selfhosted as "the project that ended my paper backlog"
  • Active GitHub Discussions community
  • Continuous releases tracking OCR improvements
  • Community-maintained fork of original Paperless (now Paperless-ngx)

What we ship

  • Docker compose: Paperless-ngx + Postgres + Redis + Tika + Gotenberg
  • Pinned ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:2.13.5 (release-tagged)
  • HTTPS via Let's Encrypt; admin user with random password
  • OCR enabled with English + Italian + German language packs
  • Persistent volumes for documents + database
  • Email ingestion configured (requires SMTP creds in env)
  • Backup hook covers Postgres + documents (CRITICAL — opt-in for size)
// Tips & operations

Run it properly.

Operational guidance from running this in production — what to do before you scale, what to lock down, what surprises people.

// PERFORMANCE
Email ingestion changes life
forward all bills/receipts to a dedicated address, auto-import
// SECURITY
Document tagging ML
needs training data; tag 50-100 documents manually first
// OPERATIONS
OCR is CPU-heavy
bulk-import of years of paper can take days; let it run
// RELIABILITY
Use S3 for documents
local storage grows fast; offload originals to S3-compatible
// DEPLOYMENT
Tika + Gotenberg for office docs
DOCX/PPTX preview needs these sidecars
// SCALING
Backup is critical
these ARE your important documents; verify backup integrity regularly
2048
// min ram (MB)
20
// min disk (GB)
8000
// access port
http
// protocol
pro
// bluixapps tier
docker.io/library/redis:8 · docker.io/library/postgres:17-alpine · docker.io/gotenberg/gotenberg:8.25 · docker.io/apache/tika:latest · ghcr.io/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx:latest
// docker image

Project resources

Official sitedocs.paperless-ngx.com ↗
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